Is there any kind of proposed standard for the metadata of a syllabus? I'd love to use it myself, I find myself recreating my own syllabi as a plaintext (Markdown) document, over and over, when it seems like the recipe is clear enough to do it in a way that can easily be converted into machine-readable metadata.
No, I don't believe there is, but something like that would be fantastic. I believe some universities in the UK publish reading lists in XML format, but I don't know of any US universities that do that. It would certainly make this kind of citation analysis much easier and more accurate. Syllabi are tricky to work with because there's basically no standardization in how texts are referenced / assigned. Sometimes ther…
More generally, we decided that trying to get faculty to adopt better structured authoring tools for syllabi was hopeless. There are lots of good, unused syllabus-building tools.